Lucky Gordon
In the weeks that followed the death of one time high-ranking Conservative cabinet minister Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, aged 91, itzcaribbean.com caught up with Lucky Gordon, who was also caught up in the ‘scandal’.
Today almost 40 years on, Lucky, who has always felt that the media portrayed his character unfairly, is wistful on the subject.
When ‘Lucky’ Aloysius Gordon, a Jazz pianist, arrived in the UK from Jamaica in the late 1940’s, little did he know that he would be involved in one of the most sensational political scandals of the 20th Century, the ‘Profumo Affair’.
It was the early 1960’s and Profumo was forced to resign from the Cabinet for lying to the House of Commons over his affair with call girl Christine Keeler. Lucky Gordon, one of Christine Keeler’s lovers, became involved in a jealous love triangle, along with fellow West Indian, Johnny Edgecombe. A fight between the two men at the Flamingo Club in Wardour Street, led to Johnny looking for her at Stephen Ward’s Harley Street flat, and shooting at the door.
The Soho nightclub that became one of the most influential venues in 1960s Swinging London for the emerging popular music scene, and the first to attract a crowd in which white and black people mixed. It was Keeler’s West Indian lovers whose knife fight over her triggered the chain of events that brought down the Tory Government in 1963. The media coverage was huge and the story was later dramatised in the 1989 film ‘Scandal’.
On seeing Profumo again, Lucky says “No, never, and actually I wouldn’t really of wanted to.”
“If we had of met, I would of said that we were both silly, to carry on with her from the start, because we always knew what she was like. I felt sorry for him, before and when he died. I was blaming him for a long time, and it stopped me from carrying on with my life, but I still forgive him.”
“The reason, he gets my sympathy, is because we were all victims of the scandal, and I am deeply sorry that he passed away, and wish the whole affair had never happend.”
March 2006